Snapshot Labs raises $4 million for popular DAO voting platform. Snapshot plans to use the funds to expand the reach of its DAO governance tools.
$4M in funding will allow SNAPSHOT to acquire more talent and engage with the larger blockchain ecosystem. Their DAO governance tools offer the best of both worlds: on-chain and off-chain ways to create and update proposals.
The DAO funding round was announced on Friday. Among its participants were investment fund 1kx, The LAO, MetaCartel Ventures, Gnosis, StarkWare, Coinbase Ventures, BoostVC, Scalar Capital, Fire Eyes DAO, LongHash Ventures, and Coopérative Kleros.
A significant milestone for a project that previously relied on Gitcoin community donations, the raise comes at a time when the size and responsibilities of DAOs are soaring, including a growing chunk of the $250 billion decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. It is a group of individuals using various tools on the Internet to carry out governance decisions related to blockchain protocols, pooled investments, or any other experiment.
Snapshot Blockchain Voting
CoinDesk quoted anonymous project founder “Fabien” as saying Snapshot started as a side project while he was working for automated market maker Balancer. In order to develop a “simple voting portal,” Fabien built an implementation that could be used for other projects.
Snapshot was open-sourced in 2014, and was quickly adopted by early yield farming initiatives like Yam and Yearn. Today, 2,000 token communities use it, including the top 10 DeFi protocols, including Aave, Uniswap, and Sushi.
Fabien has encouraged the code being forked multiple times, and it is being used on the back end for more elaborate projects than Snapshot.
As an example, Ethereum Name Service (ENS) used Snapshot during its token airdrop to allow users to vote on articles of the project’s founding document before receiving tokens.
DAOs: The Future of Emerging Markets And Decentralized Finance
Funds raised by Snapshot will be used to make these types of background integrations easier. This includes allowing the platform to be included in various DAO development kits such as DeepDAO and Boardroom, as well as scaling the project. As a result of the ENS drop, Fabien said, the team realized it must prepare for “hundreds of thousands of users.”
Because Snapshot is a community-driven project, Fabien did mention that it may tokenize with its own airdrop in the future, but that it won’t happen in the near future.
Their goal was to make Snapshot community-owned, so they were considering creating a token, but it was not a high priority yet as the priority was to solve voting, Fabien said.
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